[ocaml-infra] ocaml.org licensing

[Christophe Troestler]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2014 17:07:08 +0100, Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Amir Chaudhry <amc79 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> > Firstly, I agree that having license info at the top of each
> > source file is better.  It becomes more clearly visible for people
> > who are contributing solely via the web-based workflow (we've had
> > a number of those now).
> 
> Then, we should have both: headers in files for people contributing
> through the web, and licenses in directories for people contributing
> the Unix way.

I am not sure.  I think this file will likely be overlooked (plus,
does it apply recursively or do you copy it in every sub-directory of,
say, site/ ?  I am also unclear about what is “unixish” in having a
license file in each subdir.

> > Finally, although this is not purely a licensing issue, I'm
> > concerned about the comment "whoever wants to customize its own
> > version of the website ...".  If this a reference about people
> > (already) wanting to fork the site and maintain other versions
> > then I'm quite concerned.  Licensing shouldn't prevent content
> > re-use but this sounds like the opposite of building a community.
> 
> I don't see a link between preventing other people from creating their
> variant of ocaml.org, and "buiding a community" (which I interpret as
> "growing the OCaml community"). I would prefer having 10 major
> websites about OCaml (one for OCaml under Windows, one for the Chinese
> community, one for OCaml on mobiles, etc.), with 10,000 users behind
> each one, than having just one website with 500 users, which would be
> "the community website".

One can always dream of several 10,000 visitors a day but multiplying
the number of sites will not make it happen.  Python, for all its
followers, does not have several sites that all pretend to be the main
reference.  All other sites talking about python will happily
reference http://python.org/ as the place were python lives.  We have
about 1000 visitors a day ATM and the task force in the community is
not that large.  I think it is more efficient to have all willing
people improve a single (multilingual) web site (which has been
thought from the start to run well on mobiles BTW).

> You might also want to have the equivalent of "Affero GPL" for
> contents (I am not a specialist, but I imagine some CC licenses do
> that): let people use the content of this site, but force them to
> allow you to take back their contributions.

Doesn't CC BY-SA 4.0 do just that (see the "ShareAlike" clause)?
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Best,
C.